Amidst all the hustle and bustle of the holidays, since I do most my shopping online, I'm done shopping within a short amount of time. With all this time on my hands it is the perfect time to begin planning for next school year.
Where do I begin?
1). My husband--I ask him to tell me if there are topics that he feels a need to be covered. If there is nothing then I go on to #2.
2). My kids--I ask them what areas they're interested in "that we haven't covered yet." That's the hint to them that they have to pick--something. LOL When they give me topics, I take them back to my husband to ask him to help me fill in the blanks in my own memory, suggest areas he'd like to see them study and to ask for prayer. Then I move to #3.
3). Sonlight.com has such wonderful biographies, classics and some newer titles that fall under historical fiction from the point of view of a young person. They have everything organized by grade/age/topic. If you want to buy their Core programs, that is up to you. I prefer to use Sonlight as a resource of good books. They are very high priced, so I look for select books based on the suggestions from #1 & #2 at amazon.com. Most of the time I can get a book for $.01 and just pay shipping. Usually this ends up being MUCH cheaper than it would if I would buy 3 Cores for my kids.
4). If I've exhausted all of the areas to look on Sonlight, I go to Rainbow Resource Center and look up books by topic. Once I get the book suggestions, I comparison shop to see if amazon would be cheaper. Usually I get it cheaper, but not always. There were 8 books this year that I couldn't find on amazon, so I just ordered the one book and didn't worry about the rest. Additionally, Rainbow Resource Center has such a wonderful selection of every possible topic in their catalog. Occationally, I'll pull out the catalog when I can't sleep and peruse a couple pages writing down the items that I think my kids would like. Of course I don't get all of them. It's just a wish list. =O)
5). After I look on the above mentioned sites, I scour Children's Books for additional resources like curriculum. I look around on ebay for Easy Grammar because there isn't a store in our area where I can purchase this product. I sometimes find it, but not always. This past year I had it on my watch list, but when I was ready to purchase it someone had already bought it. I bought it at Children's Books for a couple dollars more, but nothing too aweful.
6). I usually go to our Plants Grown Up and Polished Cornerstones books to see what we haven't covered yet and put those books on our amazon wish list as well.
7). We use Apologia for all of our Science work now, so we try to find it at a less expensive price than the website. If we cannot find anything cheaper, we can know that we're putting our money toward good curriculum.
8). For Language Arts for our older two children, we use Switched on Schoolhouse by Alpha Omega Publishers.
9). For Math, we use Math-U-See for the boys and Switched on Schoolhouse for our daughter.
There are a host of other places to look for neat things for kids like Timberdoodle, Keepers of the Faith, Vision Forum, Love to Learn among some of them. There are also resources for used curriculum, vegsource.com/homeschool is one of them. I don't frequent this site much any longer. It took a lot of my time to scour the site, email back and forth and so forth. It just wasn't worth my time. I'd rather spend my time creatively.
So, the all important question..."What are we going to cover next year?"
So far we've nailed down "Wars", "India", & "Russia". We do 4 maybe 5 if we can, units each year. At this point we haven't decided about the additional units, but I'm sure it will be decided in the next couple of weeks.
I am usually done planning and selecting everything we need for the next school year by the end of February.
How about you?
No comments:
Post a Comment